Maple Oatmeal Bread and Quinoa Bread (17 of 42)

Tip du jour:  If you have too many cookbooks, or at least too many to keep track of, you may want to check out Eat Your Books.  You can enter your cookbooks and it will let you search them for ingredients and provide you with a list of recipes (but not the recipes themselves) in the books you own.  It is a search engine for your personal cookbook collection.  Both 5 Minute Bread books are available and indexed.  There is a 30 day free trial, so you might want to play around with this.

Do you ever get really excited to see a movie, have high expectations for it, can't wait for it to come out, and then feel slightly disappointed after you have seen it.  That is the way I felt about the Maple Oatmeal Bread.   I thought I would really, really like this, so I made a full batch instead of a half.

I made a loaf

and I made English Muffins. 

The bread baked up fine, my saintly wife liked it, but there was just something about the flavor profile that I did not care for.  Perhaps I expected it to be sweeter or maybe it had to do with the buttermilk.   Anyway, it just did not live up to my expectations. But now I know.

On a related oatmeal bread note, we love oatmeal made with steel cut oats.  I do it in the rice cooker.  Some time ago I adapted a no-knead steel cut oat bread recipe to the AB in 5 format:

5 Minute Steel Cut Oats No Knead Bread
Makes 2 1-pound loaves, keeps 14 days
1/2 cup whole wheat flour         65g
1/2 cup steel cut oats                 80g
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour         315g
1 1/2 cups water                            338g
3/4 TBS instant yeast                         
  2 tsp salt                                                

Follow usual AB in 5 protocol--form and let rise 40 minutes, slash top, bake at
450 for 30 minutes using water for steam. 

The next loaf was Quinoa bread.  According to Wikipedia Quinoa is  "a species of goosefoot (Chenopodium)" that is "a grain-like crop grown primarily for its edible seeds."  It is not a true cereal or grain "as it is not a member of the grass family." It is "closely related to species such as beets, spinach, and tumbleweeds."   The article notes that "Quinoa originated in the Andean region of South America, where it has been an important food for 6,000 years. Its name is the Spanish spelling of the Quechua name.  The Incas, who held the crop to be sacred, referred to quinoa as chisaya mama or mother of all grains, and it was the Inca emperor who would traditionally sow the first seeds of the season using 'golden implements.'" For our purposes--healthy baking--"[u]nlike wheat or rice (which are low in lysine), and like oats, quinoa contains a balanced set of essential amino acids for humans, making it an unusually complete protein source among plant foods. It is a good source of dietary fiber and phosphorus and is high in magnesium and iron. Quinoa is gluten-free and considered easy to digest. Because of all these characteristics, quinoa is being considered a possible crop in NASA's Controlled Ecological Life Support System for long-duration manned spaceflights."

Gee, how could we ever eat anything else.  

I formed the dough into a boule, and put it into my Duct Tape Couche to rise. Then I baked it in my flame orange pot. 

It came out right purty.

With a nice crumb.

My saintly wife and I both liked this bread a lot.

Since Quinoa is from the Andes I decided to run with the"indigenous to the Americas" theme, and to go with our Quinoa Bread I made a Chili Verde with tomatillos (from Becca's and Marissa's garden), poblano peppers (from my garden) and turkey (from the freezer).

With some of the dough I had left I made flatbreads on the grill to hold some chicken sausages.

They worked and tasted great, especially with some Ben's Sweet and Hot Mustard.   

I used the rest of the dough to make a pizza.

Tha-tha-tha-that's all folks.  Tune in next time and be sure to check out what everyone else did with these breads at Big Black Dog.